News

Blinkx Launches TV Finder — Blinx Remote

Video search engine Blinkx ( http://www.blinkx.com ) has launched Blinkx Remote, a tool for finding TV programs (and snippets) on the Web. You can try it directly at http://www.blinkx.com/remote .

What you’ll find here is a list of browsable TV shows, from #1 Single to Zoey 101. Some of these shows have icons indicating that there are paid versions of episodes as well as full episodes available online.

Click on a TV show (I chose Space Ghost Coast to Coast) and you’ll get a preview windows, and a list of available videos with thumbnails (the thumbnails are animated, which is a little disturbing.) You’ll also get pointers to places you can buy episodes (iTunes, UnBox, etc.) and places to get more information about the show. Blinkx only played previews of the videos I wanted to look at — to see the full versions it looks like you have to go to the originating sites (I saw video from YouTube, Google Video, IFILM, etc.)

Now obviously not everything that was found was a full episode (according to Blinkx there are over 200,000 videos related to Space Ghost.) I saw preview clips, commercials, favorite clips, even a music video from Pavement. Occasionally I saw the same clip listed several times.

Blinkx doesn’t list all or even most of the TV shows ever aired in the US, but you can do keyword searches. I did a search for Sesame Street. I found some clips, some news stories, one purported mashup that took me to a definitely-not-safe-for-work-I-gotta-go-boil-my-eyeballs video site, and even some live character appearances. Sesame Street is not on the Blinkx Remote show list however and there were not pointers to more information about the show.

I haven’t used Blinkx in quite a while — it’s really come a long way. I would start with the show list and browse if I were trying to find a specific show, and then do some general keyword searching. And look carefully at the source of a video before going to that site.

This post came from ResearchBuzz, a site with news and information about online data collections. Visit us at ResearchBuzz.com .

Categories: News